LB 2325 
• H254 
1921 
Oopy 1 



ADDRESS 



OF THE 



PRESIDENT OF THE 
UNITED STATES 



AT THE 



COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES 

of the AMERICAN UNIVERSITY 

WASHINGTON, D. O, on JUNE 8 

1921, at 2 p. M . 




4 £* . 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1921 



ADDRESS. 



To Bishop Hamilton, the Faculty," the Graduating Class, ani> 
Student Body: 

I am giacl to extend greetings and congratulations on completion 
of another year's work of the University. We are at the height of 
the annual commencement season, when thousands of students go out 
from institutions all over the land to take up the tasks for which 
their years of study have been preparing them. 

I wish I could impress the young men and women of every gradu- 
ating class this year with my own acute conviction regarding the 
obligation of service that is placed upon them. They have been 
favored with the privilege of special equipment and preparation^ 
such as is vouchsafed to an all too small proportion of the people. 
They will not prove themselves worthy of their peculiar good for- 
tune or of their special responsibility unless they regard it as a trust 
to be held for the good of the whole community. 

We look to this month's graduating classes to provide far more 
than their numerical share of leaders for the Nation in a future not 
far ahead. You will play your parts in a world in many ways unlike 
any that former generations of your colleagues could have antici- 
pated. 

I would feel that I had performed well the part that has provi- 
dentially fallen to me if I could impress upon everyone who goes 
out this year with a diploma the thought that it is not a certificate 
of right to special favor and profit in the world but rather a com- 
mission of service. Men all about you will need the best you will 
be able to give to them. 

Never, I firmly believe, was there a time when the call was so in- 
sistent as that to those capable of giving unselfish, broad, compre- 
hending direction to public thought. 

You of the next generation of leadership will live in a time of 
readjustment and reorganization. Much that has been esteemed ele- 
mental has been swept aside. Almost nothing remains that we may 
safely think of as sacred, as secure from the attacks of the icono- 
clasts. It is a time in which men search their souls and assay their 
convictions, in which they examine the very fundamentals of insti- 
tutions immemorially accepted, in which no tradition may be held 
immune from the assaults of the skeptic and the doubter. 

52231—21 (3) 



In such a time I can not but feel that the great need which proper 
education can supply is embraced in the broadest culture, the most 
inclusive vision, the most clear-eyed comprehension of the terms 
which mankind's problem to-day presents. There was a time, and 
not very long ago, when we were wont to think of education as a 
sort of specialized training for some kind of special service. We 
esteemed it as an intensive process of equipping fortunate persons 
for doing particular things particularly well along established and 
accepted lines. To-day we may say that there are few accepted lines. 
Xo thing remains with us that is not queried. Therefore we need for 
the leadership of the coming generation an open-minded willingness 
to recognize the claim of the doubter, the innovator, the experimenter, 
the would-be constructionist. 

But while we must give these adventurous ones their full chance, 
we must sedulously guard against the spirit of mere cynicism, the 
disposition to condemn all things as they are because they are not 
perfect, the tendency to tear down before any plan of reconstruction 
has been prepared. The trained mind — provided it is not over- 
trained — is the one that must provide the saving faculty of dis- 
crimination. The world must go forward, and not backward ; and it 
will not go forward as the result of any philosophy of mere destruc- 
tion. After all. unsatisfactory as some earnest people regard the 
present structure of society and existing human relationships, a 
reasonably conscious world has been a long time traveling as far on 
the road toward ideal conditions as it now has reached. History has 
afforded many illustrations of societies crumbling and going to pieces, 
and the process has invariably been attended with superlative dis- 
aster to great masses of humanity. It is a commonplace that at this 
time the world stands on the brink of what looks much like a preci- 
pice. It must not be allowed to take the fatal plunge. It will not, 
if it shall be able to summon to its leadership in the coming generation 
men and women who will unite a necessary measure of conservative 
purpose with an equally necessary portion of willingness to consider 
new expedients, to test out old formulas, to apply the acid test even 
to what we have learned to believe is pure gold. 

The education that can truly prepare for. the demands of society 
in the time before us can not be given merely in academic halls. 
The great world outside must contribute of its practical experience, 
its intimate knowledge, its discipline and disappointments, to com- 
plete the equipment. We can learn much from books, but if we 
learned only from books we would learn only the wisdom of the 
past. Nobody will ever live long enough or be wise enough to 
equip himself with all the wisdom of the past, to say nothing of 
projecting it into the future. The student who has learned the art 



of learning, of application, of concentration upon the particular 
problem before him, will find that he is better qualified for the prac- 
tical affairs of life than the one who has merely stowed even a very 
great array of facts in his brain. Books are tremendously useful if 
they be made the servitors of the inquiring mincl ; they may be dead- 
ening and worse than useless if they become the master of the too re- 
ceptive mind. He who has learned how to use books, how to find what 
he requires in them and then to apply it, without the necessity of 
overloading his mind with unnecessary detail, is the one who has 
made his educational preparation most useful. As a mere storage 
warehouse, for facts, beliefs, impressions, the human mind is an 
unsatisfactory plant. It is too liable to error and too limited in its 
capacity. But, on the other side, when it is used as a macerator of 
information, a molding, developing, forming, and re-forming mecha- 
nism, it does its best work. To do that work, it must possess the 
qualities of boldness, originality, confidence. It must be capable of 
sustained and well-directed effort. 

80, to the young men and women in cap and gown, gathered here and 
on a thousand other platforms to receive the testimonies that they have 
completed their allotted academic courses, I would plead that they 
recognize that, after all, the effectiveness of their educational effort 
will at last be in proportion to their recognition that it is only prepara- 
tion and not conclusion. 

There is no such thing as finished education. The wisest person 
that ever lived took his last observation of life and living into a mind 
which was still in the processes of preparation. 

It is, I think, a part of our national good fortune that we have 
viewed culture from this standpoint. I think the college graduate 
who imagines himself at the completion of his education is one of 
the most pathetic human spectacles we have to view. Fortunately, 
he is not nearly so numerous as the humorous paragraphers would 
have us believe. Fortunately, also, in case he may be too well endowed 
with self-esteem and confidence, the world has special facilities for 
rapidly and efficaciously reducing the excess of assurance. 

Its democracy is one of the fine things about our American sys- 
tem of higher education. It is almost invariably true that any young 
man or woman, who earnestly wishes it, may attain the privileges 
of the best educational preparation. There is, thank God, no caste 
system here. All kinds of experience, of social background, of an- 
cestry, of tradition, of training are brought together in the melting 
pot of the American college or university. Neither social nor intel- 
lectual snobbery is likely very long to survive such experience. That 
is why education, when it is of the right sort, is the greatest leveling 
and democratizing influence we can find. It inculcates a realization 



of true standards, an appreciation of the fact that differences in 
estate and fortune are, after all, but the superficialities of life as 
compared to the fundamentals of character, ambition, and deter- 
mined purpose. To whatever extent it fails to impress this concep- 
tion of the democracy of intellect, education will brand itself a 
failure. 

The young men and women who are coming upon the world's stage 
to-day, equipped to take their parts as leaders, will find themselves 
welcomed as their predecessors have not always been in other times. 
Humanity is seeking as it never sought before for those who can see 
widely, clearly, fearlessly ; who will be capable of determining what 
is sound and what is right, and courageous enough to stand for it, 
though they stand alone. Interrogation points have been written in 
the blood and sufferings of countless millions, at the end of a thou- 
sand statements of what a little time ago we deemed the very basic 
principles of economics, of sociology, of international relationships, 
of public policy and human justice. We must have that faculty oj: 
fine discrimination which shall understand what is good, true, and 
reliable, and what is false, unjust, and vicious. 

I have known somewhat intimately a good many young people who 
have been growing into their years of maturity within the time of 
the great crisis through which the world has been and is still passing. 
My observation of them and of their attitudes toward life has given 
me, I may tell you, a greater confidence in our future than seems to 
be reflected in the pessimistic observations of some who would have 
us believe that, because our young people nowadays see things differ- 
ently than we older ones saw them, the youth of to-day must some- 
how be a bit degenerate. On the other hand, I am convinced that 
their early introduction to the realities of life has given to the youth 
of our day a truer perspective, a better appraisal of human and social 
values. I have faith to believe that success, in the minds of educated 
young people to-day, means less in terms of dollars than it did two 
generations, or a generation, or a decade ago, and that it means more 
in terms of sincere human service than it ever did before. If I am 
right, then surely we have accomplished much for the betterment of 
mankind ; for it is a great thing to have implanted such a spirit, such 
a purpose, such a vision, in the minds and souls of those who are to 
direct our future. This we have done to a greater extent in our gen- 
eration than ever before in a like period. 

The world and its experience constitute the greater university in 
which all of you have yet to complete, so far as it is humanly pos- 
sible, your education. I pray you to go out to it without too much 
thought of personal rewards, of individual gains; and yet, not to 
thrust these considerations entirely aside. Be generous, but do not 



dissipate your capital of knowledge and ability in aimless, useless 
generosities. Hold true to those ideals which your own country and 
its institutions represent. We Americans will best help mankind at 
large if we most earnestly sustain men immediately about us. Let 
us make our America the best place on earth in which men and women 
may dwell. Let us make it an example to all others, an inspiration 
and a model. It has been our privilege to see this country which we 
love called upon to redress the wrongs of a world, to restore the bal- 
ance of civilization. We could not have played that part had we 
not first been true to ourselves, confident of our destiny, assured of 
our righteousness and of the power inherent in our concept of right- 
eousness. Let us go on, holding fast to what, in the great trial, has 
bee ti proven good, seeking to make it better, stronger, and more un- 
selfish. Let us place a firm reliance in our destiny and let us seek to 
realize that destiny through unceasing effort and unfaltering devo- 
tion. 

Humanity never needed broad, illuminated understanding more 
than it does now. It mu)st needs lean heavily upon those to whom it 
has given its best of opportunity for preparation. Those who to-day 
hold aloft as best they can the standard of civilization and progress 
must presently pass it on to you who are just entering upon your 
responsibilities. I can think of no greater service I could render 
than to impress upon every graduate of this June the part that 
awaits him in humanity's affairs, if he will but realize it. Therefore, 
I implore a dedication to common service, to human betterment, to 
civilization's advancement, on the part of these young people who 
at last must so largely direct the affairs of country and of society in 
the hard but very hopeful times which lie ahead. 



?D 2.8« 



HIM HIM Mill lllll Hill II 

019 " 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

111 



019 737 106 7 



